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233. happenstance

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Quick disclaimer: this post will deal with my sex life in unsexy and entirely untitillating language. Because my relationship with sex these days is… well, complicated.

I haven’t had many relationships that could be described as healthy. Beginning with my family (our first relationship lab, as it were), through my tumultuous teenage years, up to present-day, my life has been a decades-long exercise in keeping people closest to me at a safe and comfortable distance.

Clearing my orbital neighborhood, so to speak.

There was also the culture of shame endemic in the evangelical Christian community. Religious fundamentalists in general are adept at wearing masks to hide their true faces from each other for fear of judgment, shaming, and reprisal. In my community, it was often done with a smile. under the guise of “prayerful” good intentions; and in my family, Bible verses were often used as reminders of how we weren’t living up to the Bible’s standard for Christian living.

Not only did our parents disapprove of us—God also disapproved.

Consequently, as I wrote about in a recent blog entry, virtually all of my relationships up until now have been based on fear. I learned to fear everyone, regardless of whether there was something there to actually be afraid of.

At the same time, I desperately longed for acceptance, for belonging, and safety. The cognitive dissonance was, and still is, deafening.

This has played itself out in my sexual relationships in a number of highly toxic ways.

For one, I’m ashamed to say that once I became sexually active, I began using sex to try to achieve intimacy. It’s not the sex part that shames me in hindsight as how embarrassingly stereotypical that was. And it never worked. After I broke things off with my first boyfriend (i.e., “Aaron 1.0”), I had quite a few hookups on the way to my second boyfriend (“Aaron 2.0”) as a way of “catching up” to where I figured most gay men my age were—that is, age 26.

Even in those hookups, I was still hoping against hope to find a partner, someone with whom to find mutual belonging. I must have been looking so intently that, even if I had found someone compatible at that point, my expectations for the relationship would’ve doomed it to fail from the start.

Of course, after Seth I went on a sex binge, trying to literally fuck him out of my system. That didn’t work either, and each time the disappointment and the dissatisfaction deepened.

It was a cycle of self-perpetuating and self-propagating shame.

It frustrated me how friends of mine could have so much sex with seemingly no emotional consequences. There’s that line from the chorus of a recent Daft Punk song:

We’re up all night for good funWe’re up all night to get lucky

“Good fun” was something I was not having.

After I broke up with my most recent boyfriend in March of 2013, every sexual encounter started to leave me more and more depressed. I was thirty years old, and the rest of my life looked to be a series of endless, unsatisfying hookups.

Plus, as I wrote recently, I had defined success for myself as finding a boyfriend and partner, because that was one thing I grew up believing I could never have. So with every disappointing hookup, my parents’ voices in my mind saying that gay men lead sad, lonely lives grew more terrifying.

So I probably put myself in situations where that prophesy was mostly likely to come true.

A foursome I had last fall (which ended with me being a third wheel after one guy went to bed and the other two guys were into each other but not me) left me feeling undesirable and even more out of phase with other gay men than ever.

Meeting the bisexual tree scientist this summer (who I was actually, finally into—until he told me that he’s still in love with his ex-boyfriend and that they were trying to get back together) left me feeling as if there’s a game of musical chairs going on, and everyone else is faster than me.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of impossible expectations and a ton of emotional trauma (yes, some of it self-inflicted) wrapped up in sex besides just getting off with another person.

So much that I can’t enjoy it properly anymore.

For example, a couple weeks ago, a friend introduced me to a guy at a gayming party, texting me before I arrived that he’d found my “future husband.” I shouldn’t have taken it seriously, but before I could stop myself, I started surreptitiously studying this guy, imagining our future together, in Technicolor. We did hook up later that evening, and while he clearly had fun, he also made it clear that he’d just got out of a five-year relationship and wasn’t interested in anything serious.

Just like all of the others, I thought.

So I’m taking a break from sex for now. It’s just too confusing and unhealthy. I’ve been saying that sex is like advanced graduate studies in relationships, and I’m still trying to just finish high school. Frankly, I need to get to the root of this need to base my self worth on external factors, like looks and performance, first.

The tough thing about that is that it’s hard not to resent everyone who is in a relationship, or who is able to enjoy sex without the resulting existential tsunami. Of course, we can’t know what’s really going on in other people’s relationships or in their minds. Maybe everyone else really is just as afraid and insecure, but can simply cope better. However, when your emotional vocabulary is based on fear, it’s difficult not to invent reasons why a relationship is already doomed, or turn an otherwise fun, pleasurable experience into an emotional minefield.

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8 thoughts on “233. happenstance”

You know, I often appreciate your use of wording in entries like these. Something to note, though, no one, anywhere has it easy. Life is struggle, if not physically then existentially. Anyone who claims otherwise is deluded or lying. Learning to enjoy the conflict in your own way is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.

A piece of advice about it: go into it looking to find a new you. Don’t go into it running away from a problem, but with the intent of meeting it head on. Your purpose walking into it will be a big indicator of the potential results. What’s more, while there, try to fantasize about others in those private moments in a new way. It sounds odd I know, but often the method of sexual daydreaming can be a big contributor to former problems.

I can relate in a lot of ways. I was single for a long time before Mark and in that period I had decided to take a break. I had abstained from sex because I wanted to redefine it. I didn’t like the idea of framing my life through others, (pornography, the bar, a variety of media forms) and it was time to reclaim a part of me. Before my break, my fantasies were… typical. Your standard porn fare, often kinky, but upon closer inspection I found them lacking emotionally. I realized I employed them when I did in a “safe” way, everything went as expected, every time. You often think your erotic thoughts are just what you are “into,” but context can be refined. After the mental vacation, I found myself with a new drive, not so worried about how things go. I was much more sensual, and I realized my fascination with tantric touch.

For me, the process lasted about two or three months. I think you would do well with it. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing broken about you, and it hurts a little to hear it. This doesn’t mean stop expressing it by the way, but it does mean you have legitimate support from those around you. As a final note, I suggest developing a mantra to break the negative thought cycles when they start, you deserve better.

Hi, Angus. I didn’t take offense but am wondering what you mean by “your life is exactly what I’m afraid what my life will turn into.” If you’re comfortable sharing, could you elaborate more on that? Feel free to email me, too, if that’s easier.

Those previous comments seem a bit harsh to me, but to each their own view. I relate a lot to your writing as I too have left my faith, after being a devout Catholic after 41 years. The self-loathing and focus on family is a difficult thing to release if you’ve grown up very religious, and those who were not in a fundamentalist faith may not truly appreciate this struggle. I can’t even imagine the additional struggle of being a gay man and trying to navigate relationships with that kind of religious baggage around your neck. It sounds to me like you’re taking a sensible approach the whole thing, exploring abstinence for the moment and seeing if that leaves you in a better place. I refuse to believe you will grow to be a lonely old man…don’t give up hope.

But for me, there’s no such thing as a “vulnerable topic.” Perhaps it’s some kind of coping mechanism, but nothing is “out of bounds” for me, probably because the majority of “my life” (i.e., the previous 28 years before atheism) doesn’t feel like it belongs to me anymore.

That’s the crazy thing about losing your faith…it makes your whole former religious life seem like a lie. I’m now an agnostic verging on atheism, and the whole of the 41 years I spent as a devout catholic seems like it belongs to a different person. David, you’re quite a bit further out from your loss of faith than I am (I lost mine only 3 months ago)…I wonder if you’d consider blogging about how you survived your initial loss of faith, and if you have any advice for those of us who are earlier in the process? You may not have the time or the desire to address such things, but if you do, I’d be interested in what you have to say.